IMPROVING EMPLOYEES AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCES THROUGH THE EXPATRIATE PROCESS: A CROSS-CASE ANALYSIS.

Times are moving fast, especially if political changes are coming up. Romania's accession to the European Union is followed by several changes in the field of human resource management. Employees are moving beyond borders to work abroad and need to be caught and integrated in the new working environment. The purpose of the article is to present the challenges and consequences arising from globalization and affecting human resource management practices and strategies in the 21st century, in some selected companies from Romania, using a longitudinal perspective. The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the expatriate selection process. To satisfy the research purpose we addressed some questions: which are the reasons for sending managers abroad as expatriates, which are advantages and disadvantages of using expatriates and which are the roles of expatriates. Various challenges that expatriate managers and their families confront overseas are also discussed, such as the problem of adjusting to a new culture, the feeling of the culture shock. This paper also addresses the issue of whether over time there is an increasing "Europeanization" (convergence) of human resource management practices in the companies. The issue of convergence in human resource practices has important implications for human resource managers in multinationals who operate in Europe and the transferability of human resource practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]